How Platform Cooperativism Can Unleash the Network

Title

Kurzthese:

The distrust of the dominant extractive model of the "sharing economy" is growing. Labor and logistics companies such as Uber have been criticized for eliminating democratic values such as accountability, dignity, and rights for workers. Using various examples, Scholz will introduce what he calls platform cooperativism, an Internet based on communal ownership and democratic governance. Let's move the economy in a direction that benefits more citizens. Silicon Valley loves a good disruption; let’s give them one.

Beschreibung:

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in New York City.

His book Uber-Worked and Underpaid. How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance.

His edited volumes include Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2013), and Ours to Hack and to Own: Platform Cooperativism. A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (with Nathan Schneider, O/R, 2016).

In 2009, Scholz started to convene the influential digital labor conferences at The New School. Today, he frequently presents on the future of work, solidarity, and the Internet to media scholars, lawyers, activists, designers, developers, union leaders, and policymakers worldwide. His articles and ideas have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde, and The Washington Post.